Category:

Virtualization

The week ahead > VMworld 2011

by Philip Sellers August 25, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

The upcoming week is another exciting one with VMworld on the horizon. I will be on site at VMworld thanks to Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest, just one of the perks of participating in the competition.

VMworld 2011 will have a lot of new information to share about the newly released vSphere 5, which went live yesterday. vSphere 5 has a slew of new features, including the introduction of Storage DRS, rearchitected high availblity (HA), port mirroring in vSwitches, VMFS5 and filesystem enhancements, and many more. I hope to learn more and write about Storage DRS in more depth, as its one of the bigger feature sets added and it encompasses a lot of technology and capabilities.

The week is also one of the best networking (as in people, not wires) events of the year. With over 17,000 attendees planned this year, it is by far the largest of events I have ever attended. I’m looking forward to seeing some folks I met at HP Discover this year and hopefully meet some other folks I’ve run into on Twitter.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to next week. I always come back to work with some grand ideas after VMworld, so I expect this year to be no different.

August 25, 2011 0 comments

Cloud Compute Datacenter Networking Software Storage Virtualization

Simplifying IT support and deployments with converged systems

by Philip Sellers August 13, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life. Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for. It means, I have a job. Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert help of vendors’ support departments when our knowledge runs into something we just don’t know.

Unfortunately, when multiple vendors’ products are coupled together as a solution, support can become nasty as vendors point back and forth at each other while trying to get to a resolution. The more complex the solution, for instance a SAN, the more difficult to troubleshoot through the multiple layers of software, firmware and hardware, even multiple vendors of the solution. And, I believe, the hassle has made customers seek a better way.

August 13, 2011 5 comments

Compute Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Scale and standardize with a converged storage solution

by Philip Sellers August 4, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Simplify. Eliminate duplication of effort. Reduce costs. Play to your core competencies. Standardize. All of these are themes I have heard in my own company as we have looked at ways to improve our IT operations. Like many companies, we try to form a plan of where our IT operations should move, motivated by making IT highly available, redundant and cost efficient.

Converge. That theme is a tougher sell in my employer’s environment. There is resistance to converging, whether it’s IP telephony on our data network versus converging our fiber channel with fiber channel over Ethernet and putting it on our same core Ethernet network. Same would go for iSCSI, if we had it. We tend to separate for simplicity reasons, but there are certainly cost savings in convergence.

Why converge?

Convergence is a major trend in IT, today, although it goes by many names. But like most trends and buzzwords (think Cloud), your mileage will vary among vendors and interpretations of the buzz. HP’s approach to convergence is largely centered around standardized x86 hardware for both server and storage platforms. In addition, the converged storage platforms within HP are about scale out, with multiple controllers to handle unpredictable and unruly disk I/O with ease.

August 4, 2011 8 comments

Apple Home Tech Personal Projects Virtualization

On this day, three years ago…

by Philip Sellers August 4, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

On this day, three years ago, I posted my first entry on Tech Talk. At the time, the idea was to try to contribute back to a community of technical resources whose blogs had contributed so much knowledge to me. I had found their blog posts about VMware ESX and vCenter invaluable and the information contained guided me along my road of implementation and kept me from making mistakes they had made. Many times, they offered caution signs and even an occasional on-ramp or off-ramp to features I had not previously explored.

Early on, I got a taste of success (particularly for a blogger with NO following) by blogging during VMworld 2008 about the announcements being made from VMware. It was the first time I had content picked up and linked to from others, and I’ll admit, it felt good. To this day, my blog still gets some traffic from web searches about VMware’s Fault Tolerence feature.

Those early results did not turn into overnight success. After VMworld 2008 and 2009, the blog has received relatively low numbers of visits, participation and readership. I allowed it to languish with only a few updates here and there. The growth has been relatively slow, but recently doors are opening up. Opportunities, like attending HP Discover and the Blogger Reality Contest, are allowing me to attend great networking and technical events, to report on great new technology being introduced, and to refine my skills as a blogger. The future for this blog is looking as bright as ever and I just wanted to to take time to thank those involved for the opportunities, support and encouragement.

August 4, 2011 1 comment

Virtualization

Announcing the Bloggers Reality Show

by Philip Sellers July 25, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

1:30pm – Updated with revised judging panel.

When I think of a reality show, I think of people competing for prizes, being judged and getting voted out of the house, off the stage or off of the island. Take that concept and apply it directly to tech bloggers and what would it be? It would be a very cool contest that I’m going to be taking part it starting the first week in August.

Thomas Jones of NikeTown588.com is hosting a blogger reality show for up and coming tech bloggers. I was lucky enough to meet Thomas during my recent trip to HP Discover and I was really excited when he announced the Blogger Reality Show contest. I was even more stoked when I got the email that said I had made it INTO the contest.

July 25, 2011 2 comments

Virtualization

Updating VMware Certification to VCP5

by Philip Sellers July 19, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

One of the additional questions I have had about the introduction of vSphere 5 is how I would update my VMware Certification to the vSphere 5 level, VCP5. Fortunately, the answer is really simple. Existing VCP4 holders will be able to take the VCP5 exam and upgrade their certification without any additional course requirements until February 29, 2012.

VMware offered the same path for existing VCP3’s when vSphere 4 was introduced in 2009. The course exemption is again a time limited offer. After February 29, those who attain or hold a VCP4 will be required to attend the $1495 “VMware vSphere: What’s New [V5]” class. The class is a 2-day class and can be attended in a classroom offering or an online offering.

For individuals who do not currently hold a VMware certification, the “VMware vSphere: Install, Manage and Configure [V5]” class is required before testing. People holding a VCP2 or VCP3 certification are treated the same as someone without a certification.

For more info, see the Certification section of the VMware website.

July 19, 2011 0 comments

Virtualization

VMware announces vSphere 5.0, changes licensing entitlement

by Philip Sellers July 12, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

UPDATE: VMware has announced an increase, effectively doubling the vRAM entitlements that were originally announced. This post is dated, and you should refer to VMware‘s site for official information on pricing…

VMware previewed vSphere 5.0 today via a live webcast with CEO Paul Martiz and CTO Steve Herrod. The vSphere 5 releases should be available in the third quarter of 2011, according to a press release from VMware. Along with many enhancements, a new licensing model was also announced which removes the physical processor and RAM limits which were previously imposed on vSphere licenses. The new model uses vRAM, or RAM allocated to virtual machines, in a pool for your entitlement. VMware says that the change is to allow for more robust hardware deployments for the cloud without restrictive hardware based entitlements. It offers the same pay-for-consumption model as cloud services.

As a current vSphere customer, I was immediately wondering what does this mean for my licenses and how will my existing licenses under maintenance be converted to vSphere 5.0. The answers to that an all the licensing changes can be found in this PDF from VMware – http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf.

In short, here are the changes:

Processor restrictions from vSphere 4 are removed. vSphere 4 Standard & Enterprise were limited to 6 cores per processor (socket). vSphere 4 Advanced and Enterprise Plus were limited to 12 cores per processor. vSphere 5 has no cores per processor restriction.

Physical RAM restrictions were removed. vSphere 4 Standard, Advanced, & Enterprise editions were limited to 256GB of RAM per host. vSphere 5 has no physical RAM restriction.

vSphere 5 introduces the vRAM per processor entitlement. vSphere Essentials, Essentials Plus & Standard liceses receive 24GB of vRAM (RAM allocated to VMs) per processor license. vSphere Enterprise receives 32GB of vRAM per processor and vSphere Enterprise Plus receives 48GB of vRAM per processor. vRAM consumption is based on the amount of allocated virtual RAM to virtual machines.

vRAM can be pooled and consumed by all hosts managed by a vCenter instance.

vSphere Advanced licensing level no longer exists in vSphere 5. Users of this level are entitled to Enterprise licensing.

The licensing guide states that vRAM entitlement should be purchased in advance of use and is based on a “high watermark” usage, however, the licensing guide says that a hard stop will not be imposed should you consume more than your license, except with vCenter Server for Essentials.

vRAM consumption is measured by the amount of virtual RAM configured to all powered on virtual machines in a vCenter instance (or multiple instances, if linked)

July 12, 2011 0 comments

Virtualization

Non-standard MSSQL port causes vCenter WebServices problems

by Philip Sellers June 16, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

After almost a year, I have had problems with the VMware WebServices (the Tomcat web apps packaged into vCenter server) not working properly. At every upgrade, I have had issues where the apps that were “fixed” by support break again. I knew I had to be doing something wrong. I thought that vCenter was just not “good” at using a non-standard Microsoft SQL Server port. The windows app seemed to work great, but the Tomcat apps seemed to be the affected.

So, my DSN was originally configured with the server string as the server name only. I suspected this was the culprit after realizing the port was likely the issue from investigating logs with VMware support. If I added the port number in the registry the Tomcat apps would go to working. However, this caused the main vCenter service to break communications with the Microsoft SQL server. After a restart and eventually while running, the service would fail to communicate.

Today, I discovered that I was on the right track, but my syntax was just wrong. While waiting on a call back from support, I stumbled onto this community post by another user, posted on May 27, 2011. The screenshot is the biggest help for me, because finally, it showed the correct syntax for ports in the Native SQL Server DSN. I am NOT a SQL Server DBA and I guess it was just a lack of knowledge on my part. Perhaps other sysadmins are in the same situation, so here is an easy solution to try.

I changed my System DSN to the syntax of <host>,<port> and magically everything broken began working again.

See the link above for more information and links to the KB articles I had been using, also. Thanks to VMware Communities user pdelliott for his post!

June 16, 2011 0 comments

Datacenter PowerCLI Storage Virtualization

VMware PowerCLI rocks

by Philip Sellers March 23, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

Its pretty easy to see where I stand on PowerCLI from the headline on this entry. Disclaimer, I haven’t used it extensively, but I can already see the why VMware has chosen to embrace PowerCLI for scripting. These are some of my initial thoughts after some light usage — in short, I think PowerCLI is extremely powerful.

Up until January, we had scripted everything for VMware in VI-Perl. I don’t begin to call myself a Perl programmer, but I can crawl in and modify a canned Perl script and I am able to make it do what I want. That said, it was always a pain to do it.

For our VMware environment, we have monitoring scripts that report low disk space for our guests, a daily snapshot report and what VM’s have been provisioned or deleted from the system. All of these were things I had to find scripts that had already been written in VI-Perl, and so we relegated scripting to simply monitoring in our environment. After we added the VMware Management Appliance to our network, we used it occasionally for Storage VMotion in the ESX 3.5 days, before it was added to the GUI.

With PowerCLI, however, we have moved into doing more actual configuration and changes — real work — using it. Because PowerShell support piping the objects between commands, we have quickly realized gains in efficiency by retrieving a list of targets and issuing a command against the group. Some things we have done manually in the past make much more sense in PowerShell. Performing a VMotion or Storage VMotion is a good example of this. Storage VMotion involves a number of steps (click, click, click, click, click) to perform in the GUI. In Powershell, its a simple, one-line and easy to understand command.

PowerCLI is much more user friendly to me than writing Perl. Soon, I plan on rewriting my management scripts using PowerCLI. There are some security related things I must figure out (haven’t even looked into them yet) – like signing PowerShell scripts with a certificate, which will be required for executing scripts on a schedule. (In our environment, we plan on making all of our PowerShell instances run in remote-signed execution policy to maintain security.

March 23, 2011 3 comments

Datacenter Storage Virtualization

Finally bought a Drobo for home

by Philip Sellers June 14, 2010

written by Philip Sellers

Last week, I found a deal I could not pass up. B&H Photo has a deal on a Drobo for $299 though 6/30/2010. If you’ve never heard of a Drobo, it is an external storage enclosure from Data Robotics that offers some enterprise-class, automated mirroring/striping for your data across multiple hard drives. Data Robotics calls it Beyond-RAID because unlike a RAID set where drives should be the same size, their technology allows mix and match drive sizes and handles striping and leveling the data across whatever mix of SATA drives you buy. If a drive fails, pull it and replace it and the device will rebuild.

I had been worried about losing my digital home movies. That data is really too large to really push out to a backup service like Mozy and when I load new movies, its usually to the tune of 20 or 30GB at a time, which would take weeks to push up. In addition to that data, I also have Movies and TV shows that we have purchased through iTunes.

June 14, 2010 3 comments